


Dark

by absolutelyCancerous (cal1brations)



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: M/M, Salvation, Self-Hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-11
Updated: 2012-10-11
Packaged: 2017-11-16 03:12:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/534844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cal1brations/pseuds/absolutelyCancerous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sitting in darkness was like waiting to run out of air at the bottom of the ocean.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dark

You consider your life as one massive descent into dark depths.

Like drowning, really.

It’s not so much “melodramatic” as much as it is simply the truth. Your entire life thus far has been a violent game of tug-of-war, yourself being the marker as your being (and sanity) is whipped back and forth—between good and bad, safe and danger. Dark and light.

You remember wondering how long you’d last, if you simply gave into the darkness that curled around you, kept an iron-grip around your heart, held you hostage. You’d been after strength your entire life, strength to protect everything that mattered. So, maybe giving in wouldn’t have been bad—that is, if you could control the monster you’d become.

You could do no such thing.

And a monster is exactly what you became. It was like being trapped in your own body, unable to control your own limbs, unable to stop yourself from attacking anything you’d come to care for; it became like breathing, like blinking. The pitch-black took over you slowly, you could feel every bit it. Burning at the interior of your throat, the backs of your eyes. Thrumming throughout your system, pumping only the purest hatred into your being.

So was the catalyst to your demise; your unknowing step towards a torturous game of keep-away.

It was in those times, when you weren’t yourself, that you saw many things that a child should never, ever see. Things that will ever mar your memories, even now they do such to you. Things you remember through too-vivid nightmares that leave you dry-heaving and scrambling to slam the light on, to scare the darkness and whatever visitors whom linger in it far away from you.

Sitting in darkness was like waiting to run out of air at the bottom of the ocean.

You had just wanted it to  _end_ , and for it to end faster than it was occurring. You wanted to open your mouth, suck in a deep breath and end it. Let the sea of darkness fully consume you, inside and out—a punishment you assured yourself you deserved.

It didn’t. You were forced to stay alive, to be perverted and horrified by all that the dark revealed to you, bit by poisonous bit.

All you wanted to do was drown.

In the dark, you remember telling yourself such  _hateful_  things. That no one was going to save you. That this, dying in these turbulent waves of self-loathing and blackness would eventually swallow you whole, would be a present for someone as despicable as you. That you weren’t even a real person anymore, because real people wouldn’t be able to live under these conditions; they’d bring death upon themselves personally, if they had to drag themselves through all the rings of fire you’ve had to. So many hateful things that, even when it’s over and you’re spared from your doom, it’s too difficult to tell yourself otherwise, it’s too much to simply  _forget_ about.

You begged for the pitch-black to swallow you then, to consume you without so much of a second thought; to fill your lungs with the liquid hatred that would end your horror, end your blatant suffering.

That end did not come. Instead, you saw the light; tiny and insignificant, it seemed. But it reached for you, offered help, offered salvation. It scared the darkness away, and you couldn’t see what else you could possibly lose at such a point in time—everything had already been utterly destroyed, your innocence, your faith, your pride. Gone. You didn’t (still don’t) even so much as venture at the thought of calling yourself a virgin, for all the utter perversion the darkness had showed you, at such a point, stole everything from you.

You were at the bottom of the ocean then, waiting for the last of your air to be used, waiting to be eaten alive.

And you still accepted the light.

You survive the pull once, being yanked up from your sea of self-hatred and the darkness that wallows within your heart. He saved you, all kinds of bright as he yanked you from your doom, something you had simply come to accept and refuse to question; you believed you deserved it, deserved to fall, to drown in your own filth that festered within your pitiful excuse for a heart.

And he didn’t care. Sora didn’t mind and he wasn’t afraid of you, and it was such a  _foreign_  feeling, to simply resume your friendship from before. You asked and asked why he didn’t just let you go, why he even bothered to save someone as hopeless as yourself (in not so many words) and every single time, without fail, Sora’s smile disappeared, sky-blue oculars staring directly into you.

His spectacular eyes became your sky; bright and hopeful. His smile, the warm rays of the sun that you’ve come to appreciate and adore more than  _anything_  in your entire existence.

“I’ll save you every time you need me, Riku. Until you  _stop_  needing me.”

You don’t feel like you’re drowning anymore.


End file.
